Got my JVC home today, damn it´s big! Had to adjust the feet to get it to fit on the top shelf of my rack. With it came two pickup´s, a Ortofon VMS 20E MKII and a JVC Z1 EB mounted in a Grase headshell,. got a carbonbrush to. Cleaned it, and adjusted it, so now i´m in vinyl heaven!.

I will let it play for a couple of weeks before I start to mod. it.

thanks for all the info, I´ll let you know how it perform when I have listend to it for a while

Now I have played on the JVc for a while, and used the VMS pu. There are still some issues I have to correct, it´s very sharp in the high notes, I thing the week link is the phonowire and plugs they are to week stock, so´I´m going to replace them with somthing better.

I also did buy a 5YF. What allignment do you use? Loefgren, Bearwalt or Stevenson. Using de specs of the Y5F leaves me with Stevenson.At some records I hev a verry sharp ssssss (Dire straits : Six blade knife)I tried several settings but can't get it right at the moment.The force is 1.8 because many say this is better than 1.6. I use a shure SFG-2 to messure the trackingforce.

I’ve owned the QL-Y7 for almost 30 years. I assume it is the brother to your ‘table. Active suspensions work but like a car they are expensive. Luckily, you’ll get to experience the rare benefits. I’m a high-compliance nut from the old school so it works with the philosophy to control the front-end so very little work is needed out the tail. The electronic Q-damping/anti-skate/ balance does more then what I want. Right now I’m using an Audio Technica AT12Sa and running it at a flyweight 0.75 grams. The stylus sticks like a train on rails and sounds beautiful- strong midrange and delicate highs then I can easily control the tight bass with my pre-amp. Yours will do it too. Try an AT120E with an AT140LC stylus at 0.8 grams and you’ll be in heaven.

I use the Stevenson Alignment. The suckers are big. Mine has to squat on top of the glass audio rack.

I found the plinth a bit noisy so I added about 6-oz. of butyl rubber caulking inside. Any resonance is fired back into the tonearm turbo-charging it- a nice boost to the midrange and highs. Any more rubber and it saps the magic.

I agree that the Y7 is a wonderful DD table. It's the best turntable I have so far and I have quite a few. Unless I can find a TT-101, the Y7 will always be my reference. After getting into JVC turntables, I sold all my Technics. It's really hard to go back to Technics after experiencing how smooth the JVC and other brands of tables with coreless motors.

There's a whole cult of Technics and I was one o them because that's the most widely available and I used to try to apologize for whatever shortcoming it has has and try to blame it on the tonearm, cartridge, plinth, etc... The fact of the matter is that the motor and drive system by Technics is simply not that great musically. It has that sterile "analog jitter" sound that is simply not smooth enough in the delicacy music. Unless all you listen it is techno or electronic music, you will hear grating or fatiguing sound over the long haul on classical music. Just try a record of solo violin or chamber music on the Technics and then go listen to the JVC and you will know what I mean. The best description I can come up with is that ALL Technics tables sound grainy. It only takes less than one minute. Sure, you can mod the hell out of it and to improve the tonal balance, imaging, blah, blah, blah, but the TEXTURE will NOT change, that is, there's micro jitters in the rotation that robs the music of its smoothness. No amount of modding or tweaking will eliminate this graininess. It's just like food, no amount of flavoring or cooking can improve a steak that's not a good cut or fresh.

The only thing I can see in truly improving the Technics is to design a completely new electronic drive system but that's high tech stuff that most people cannot do, myself included. You want smooth sound, you will have to start with a smooth motor and drive electronics. The Technics simply don't it for me and this is someone who had owned Technics stuff for almost 2 decades, including SP10mk2, SP15, SP25, SL-1200, SL-1300, SL-M3, almost all the models, except SP-10mk3. I sold them all. I am off the bandwagon. Technics stuff are still a great introduction to DD systems but that's not the only way to skin a cat and if someone is initially turned off by the sound, that's not the fault of DD system.

At one point I had over 30 DD tables in the house and I tested majority of them by using the same cartridge on a detachable headshell and invariably, all the Technics stuff sound grainy to me, each and every time! Sure, some of you will say it's still not scientific enough. Well, that's good enough for me to sell them all and I am not looking back. Gone, bye bye.

Let me put it bluntly, folks, Technics is NOT the only DD table out there and it does not represent the whole of DD technology. Raise your radar a little bit and you will find a plethora of choices out there. I have excellent experiences with Yamaha(motor is often JVC based), Kenwood(only couple models with coreless motors that I care for), Sony, Denon, Pioneer(their cheaper ones with coreless motors are excellent and actually smoother sounding than their more famous models) and of course my favorite JVC.

Get off the Technics bandwagon for a second and you will be rewarded by your openmindedness. I know my comment might upset some people but I am just reporting my own personal audio journey. I know those who own non-Technics DD tables are keeping a tight lip about it so the price is still reasonable and let other people continue to mess with the Technis stuff... and I don't blame them!

Okay, enough of spilling the beans for now. And I need to go back to spinning records on my favorite DD tables.

This ad from 1981 was in my pile. The tonearm has brains. I think the graphs are saying one arm is musical, blurry, affected by footfalls and warp-wow while the JVC is neutral. For low frequencies, its design seems to tradeoff the big unwanted shake all tonearms have but theirs spreads and dilutes it across the lower frequencies where the energy is far weaker and has less affect. Smart thinking, I think?! I’ve seen it work and believe it especially when playing high volume music. Of course they don’t say what brand the other arm is. Could be a Crosley disco box? How high was the volume? Could a Crosley do that good?

I just bought a well-regarded Pioneer PL-530, took off the mat, then did a penny drop test on the exposed platter. It was an old test we used to do. It sang like leaded crystal! Might sound more like a small bell. The ringing is so pure and so long. I should record it. To be fair, most direct-drive turntables rang so they had thick mats but the Pioneer’s were always the best. The Pioneer has a thin mat so the question is, at higher volumes would extraneous speaker sounds migrate through the turntable to the cartridge changing the music? It’s very possible and I do remember the Pioneer sweet music going weedy and wild at high volumes. Dr. Jekyll became Mr. Hyde. But then neutral is out and musical turntables are in vogue so that leaves us out of the party.

It was actually fun to put six pennies on the Pioneer platter and keep thumping until the pennies starting ringing. Yesterday, my son had a great time. OTOH, my terrible Y7 also got the penny tests. The heavy platter plus the zinc clamp did its job- it was dull sounding- perhaps better then a belt-drive! Then put its thick super-mat on the platter and it rings like a mouse pad. For once it wasn’t hype; JVC really did have a war on resonances. I guess it is the Japanese purity philosophy. My son didn’t have fun with the JVC and I appreciated that. The Pioneer is much more fun!

Terrible, just terrible, I say! Leave those JVC’s alone! They are a little company, no money or engineers, on a little island with lots of earthquakes. What would they know about things shaking? They don’t know better. They invented Shibata tips, 4-channel, VCRs, and the VHS video format. So what, anyone can be a Pioneer (notice that little ribbing?), no big deal. No, we wouldn’t want their stuff. They are hungry and annoying mice.

Haha! I was thinking the same thing! I even tried to bid on it and did not imagine it would go that high. I think other than it's a nice table, it also includes two armwands, new cartridge in box, and seemingly mint condition. Who knows, maybe it does have something to do with us!

Fingers crossed on the packing. My Y7 was cosmetically damaged because the careless seller forgot to remove the platter! Ouch!!

The fact of the matter is that people are starting to appreciate JVC and that puts a smile on my face. Years ago when I was still into belt-drive I was buying Empire 208 for dirt cheap and then 2 years later the price went quadruple. Let's not hope for that to JVC though. Not to worry, there are still many gems out there from various brands, Yamaha, Kenwood, Sony, Denon, Pioneer, etc.....

The most overrated of them all would have to be the Thorens TD-124 and I used to own three units and I couldn't even give them away. Now, after the Art Dudley article came out in Stereophile last year, the price has gone double or triple. I still maintain it's a table that's not worth my time. To each his own, I guess.